Modern mobile cellular phones increasingly perform many functions in addition to enabling users to send and receive radio signals to make telephone calls. Thus for example in addition to being able to send voice signals many mobile phones are able to send and receive text messages. In some mobile phones a browser function is provided so that a user can use the phone to download web pages, ring tones or other data into the memory of the phone.
Many modern mobile phones are also provided with an infra red detector/emitter which enables the phone to communicate with other infra red enabled devices. A typical use for such a mobile phone would be to enable a portable computer to link to the internet via the mobile phone where the phone transmits and receives infra red signals from the portable computer and converts those signals into radio signals which are used to access the internet.
In a conventional computer architecture for a mobile phone a conversion unit is provided which is arranged to identify the different types of signal the phone can receive and to route different types of signals to appropriate functional modules for processing. Thus for example, when a phone receives a text message, the conversion unit initially recognises that a particular signal represents a text message. Once the conversion unit has determined that a received signal is representative of a text message, the message is then routed to the text message processing module for processing. Similarly when a signal representing an http message is received, it is routed to a browser module or in the case of a voice signal it is routed to the speaker of the telephone.
The existing computer architecture for routing signals within a module phone is however inflexible and a more flexible system would be desirable.